The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (46 page)

As for the French, in their thinking Ohio formed the keystone in a strategic arch that spanned North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Ohio would connect Canada to Louisiana, guaranteeing French control of the great North American heartland and forever condemning the hated British to a precarious existence on the continent’s eastern shore. More immediately, the French sought control of the Ohio fur trade, a commerce too small to support an empire but sufficient to incite the cupidity of corporations connected to government ministries.

News of the peace treaty had hardly reached America when the governor of Canada dispatched Captain Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville to Ohio to wave the French flag and plant lead plates bearing French territorial claims at strategic sites. In addition, he was to frighten off any English traders or settlers and convince the Indians of the region that their future lay with la belle France rather than perfidious Albion.

Céloron’s mission was only partly successful. Burying the lead plates was straightforward; convincing the Indians that France was their future
was more involved, not least since the easier access of English traders (who came straight over the mountains from the Atlantic, rather than circuitously via Canada) meant they could undersell their French rivals. This cost differential had given the English an edge in Ohio—an edge visible in the much larger numbers of English traders, as compared to French, Céloron encountered. His own chaplain was forced to admit that Ohio was “little known to the French, and, unfortunately, too well known to the English.”

It was the French effort to alter this balance that led to the trouble that drew first Franklin and then Washington toward the Ohio. A new governor in Canada had sent several French traders to Logstown, located on the Ohio River in what would become the extreme western portion of Pennsylvania. One of the Virginia land companies—aptly named the Ohio Company—mobilized its merchants to counter the increased French presence. This triggered a minor competition between Pennsylvania and Virginia, as Pennsylvania traders hurried across the Alleghenies lest they lose the trade, and perhaps the land that supported the trade, to their southern cousins. The Pennsylvanians appealed to their provincial government for funds to build a fort at the Forks of the Ohio (where that river was formed from the Allegheny and Monongahela). But the Assembly was as stingy on frontier defense as it had traditionally been on every other form of defense, and the initiative remained with the Virginians.

The
English
initiative, that is. The French sponsored initiatives of their own. Most ominous of these was the construction of a line of forts running south from Lake Erie toward the Forks. This construction was what rang the alarm bells in the summer of 1753 and prompted Franklin’s trip to Carlisle. It was also what lay behind Washington’s expedition farther west just afterward.

Washington arrived at Venango (near what would become the town of Franklin) only to see a French flag flying over a trading post lately English. Here he encountered the same problem of Indian weakness for alcohol—and European exploitation of that weakness—that had so struck Franklin. At Venango, Washington tried to talk the Indians out of any attachment to the French. He initially had some luck with Tanachrison, a Seneca chief, who showed a desire to resume his alliance with the English after having been wooed away by the French. Tanachrison agreed to return the symbolic wampum he had received from French captain Philippe de Joincaire. Joincaire’s first reaction, on learning of this double cross (or perhaps triple cross), was to mutter of Tanachrison, “He is more English than the English.” But Joincaire masked his anger and insisted
that Tanachrison join him in a series of toasts. By the time the keg was empty, Tanachrison was too drunk to hand back the wampum.

The rest of Washington’s expedition was no more successful. Joincaire refused the letter Washington carried from Governor Dinwiddie; he told Washington to take it to Fort Le Boeuf, north near Lake Erie. Washington wearily pushed through the rain and snow of December, finally reaching the fort and finding someone willing to accept Dinwiddie’s letter—albeit simply for forwarding to the governor of Canada. The French commander at Fort Le Boeuf politely informed Washington that evacuation of this French territory was out of the question.

Washington retired the way he had come. His horses failed on the way home, and he was reduced to walking. He came under Indian fire in the forest; he almost drowned in the Allegheny when a makeshift raft crashed against floes in the ice-laden stream. On several occasions he nearly succumbed to hypothermia. But his diary of the journey told a gripping story, which impressed Governor Dinwiddie and made Washington locally famous when the governor had it printed.

Washington’s report encouraged Dinwiddie to mount a more serious effort against the French. The Virginia governor requested assistance from Pennsylvania. To no one’s surprise, Franklin’s fellows in the Assembly displayed their customary aversion to military spending and refused Dinwiddie’s invitation. The Virginians were left to press on alone.

In the spring of 1754 Washington led two (rather skimpy) companies of militia toward the Forks of the Ohio, there to oversee construction of a fort. Unluckily for them, a larger French force had other ideas. The French troops scattered the English and leveled their unfinished handiwork. They then proceeded to lay the foundation for a more impressive French version, which they called Fort Duquesne.

Yet Washington did not discourage easily. After the embarrassment of the previous winter, he vowed to retake the Forks. He led his men on a swift night march and surprised a French scouting party, killing the commander and several others and capturing nearly all the rest. He then fell back to await reinforcements, which soon arrived.

These, however, created as many problems as they solved. They had outrun their supply train, which remained bogged in the woods behind; until the supplies arrived, the reinforcements simply ate the bread of Washington’s men. Moreover, one company consisted of British regulars from South Carolina who refused to take orders from a colonial—even a colonial colonel, as Washington now was. Neither did they warm to the work of digging trenches and constructing other necessary defenses.

The French struck while the redcoats quarreled. In a July rainstorm French muskets raked the English lines; at nightfall the French commander ceased fire and urged Washington to surrender. After all, the Frenchman argued, their countries were not at war. Washington conceded this point, and, surveying his four dozen wounded and dozen dead and the enfeebled condition of many of the unwounded, he accepted the French terms.

Whereupon he came to wish he had learned French. The terms included a pledge to pull back across the mountains to Virginia; they also included an admission that the leader of the French scouting party had been “assassinated.” Only later did Washington realize what he had signed; the knowledge mortified and angered him immensely.

Perhaps Washington’s proud heart sensed that this defeat was but the beginning of a much longer and much more violent struggle. Perhaps, despite this second humiliation, he suspected that under arms he had found his calling. In a letter to his brother he described the first skirmish—the successful one: “I fortunately escaped without a wound, though the right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy’s fire…. I can with truth assure you, I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there was something charming in the sound.”

The response
of King George to this comment (Washington’s brother shared the letter) was reported to be “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many.” Washington soon heard plenty, for the fighting on the banks of the Ohio that summer of 1754 escalated into a major war, in which Washington took a major part.

Franklin’s part in what Americans called the French and Indian War involved fewer bullets but was no less significant for that. At least since he had begun pondering the problem of colonial defense during the previous war, Franklin had been struck by the inexcusable inefficiencies consequent to the several colonies’ failure to coordinate actions. When France could count on Virginia’s jealousies of Pennsylvania and New York’s suspicions of New England, the far fewer Frenchmen in North America could effectively stymie the more numerous and otherwise more resourceful Englishmen. The example of their neighbors the Iroquois should shame those provincials who placed particular interest ahead of the common good. “It would be a very strange thing,” Franklin wrote in 1751, “if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of
forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted for ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous.”

In this letter Franklin offered a blueprint for just such a colonial union. The several colonies should select delegates to a general council, which would be headed by a governor general appointed by the Crown. This council, acting with the governor general, would direct matters relating to Indian affairs and colonial defense.

Franklin acknowledged the political difficulties such a scheme would encounter. The separate provinces were possessive of their independence and privileges; anything essayed in common would tend to diminish these. Governors often mouthed approval of colonial coordination only to subvert it privately lest it undermine their authority or diminish their perquisites.

For this reason the initiative toward the union Franklin proposed ought to be entrusted to a handpicked cadre of perhaps half a dozen men of insight, public spirit, and persuasive skills. Such a group would travel from colony to colony explaining the benefits of union and rebutting criticism. “I imagine such an union might thereby be made and established, for reasonable sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men, if they take pains, and have time and opportunity for it.” Like the Association Franklin had devised for Philadelphia, this should be an organization that grew upward from below, rather than downward from above. “A voluntary union entered into by the Colonies themselves, I think, would be preferable to one imposed by Parliament.”

As did many other Franklin schemes, this one took time to mature. The provinces were then at peace, and Franklin’s fellow provincials felt little inclination to accept the limitations on colonial autonomy his union entailed.

The resumption of hostilities on the Ohio frontier altered calculations. In June 1754 a convention of delegates from seven colonies gathered in Albany to discuss measures for intercolonial cooperation. The auguries were not especially promising; as a group the delegates were hardly the most influential men of their provinces, and such important provinces as Virginia shunned the proceedings entirely. Yet, for what it was worth, the convention had the blessing of the British Board of Trade, the London body that oversaw colonial affairs.

Franklin was selected to represent Pennsylvania, along with Richard
Peters, Isaac Norris, and John Penn, a grandson of William Penn. Planning for the event coincided with the setbacks suffered by the Virginians on the Ohio that spring. “Friday last an express arrived here from Major Washington,” noted the
Gazette
on May 9, in a piece Franklin enclosed in a letter to a correspondent in England. Washington’s dispatch described the French attack at the Forks, and it elicited reflection from the
Gazette
article’s anonymous author on the need for unity among the English colonies. From the style of the writing, and from what is known of Franklin’s views on the matter, the author quite likely was Franklin himself. To hear from Washington and other witnesses, the author said, the French were confident of success in their offensive. And why not? “The confidence of the French in this undertaking seems well-grounded on the present disunited state of the British colonies, and the extreme difficulty of bringing so many different governments and assemblies to agree in any speedy and effectual measures for our common defence and security, while our enemies have the very great advantage of being under one direction, with one council, and one purse.” So long as the English colonies remained disunited, the French would retain their advantage. “They presume that they may with impunity violate the most solemn treaties subsisting between the two crowns, kill, seize and imprison our traders, and confiscate their effects at pleasure (as they have done for several years past), murder and scalp our farmers, with their wives and children, and take an easy possession of such parts of the British territory as they find most convenient for them; which if they are permitted to do, must end in the destruction of the British interest, trade and plantations in America.”

Attached to the
Gazette
article was an illustration, a woodcut of a dismembered snake. The eight segments of the snake’s body were labeled for the two Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. Beneath the illustration was the motto “Join, or Die.” This illustration has often been characterized as the first original political cartoon printed in America; whether the artist was Franklin or someone else, the concept for the cartoon almost certainly was his. As the
Gazette
circulated through the mail, other papers reprinted the illustration, allowing readers to absorb the essence of Franklin’s argument for unity at a glance.